Topic: What's your favourite TV program of the moment?

[Beatrix]

Finished season 2 of a-typical recently and I really enjoyed it.  Very simple plots I'll admit, but I love the characters and what I learn about the protagonist teaches me tools to use for my children.

[6pairsofshoes]

Babylon Berlin is brilliant.  I blasted through both seasons and ran out of tv shows so I read the first two novels (in translation) that focus on the detective Gereon Rath, the main protagonist.  The television show is much more complex in terms of relationships and the representation of political and economic tensions under the Weimar Republic.  I'm looking forward to the next season.  I've got the third novel, Goldstein, but my German is both rusty and not expert.  I guess, all told, I had about a year and a half of language instruction, so it's a little harder to plough through it.  The French policiers like the Inspector Maigret books are much easier to read in that language.  Maybe it's because I spent more time studying French.   

At any rate, I'm out of ideas re tv right now and completely open to suggestions.

[goldshirt*9]

  no use asking me for suggestions, last series i watched was Band of Brothers

[Alfonz]

This is Us-Season 3

The injected drama is becoming over the top, yet I'll continue to watch it through.

[6pairsofshoes]

I just blasted through the first season of Lodge 49.  Kind of quirky with surfer dudes, fraternal lodge types, and a sweet sister who works at a Hooters equivalent.

Now I have nothing to watch.  Oh well.  There's always books...

One observation about Lodge 49.  The Hooters sister seems completely convincing as a SoCal girl, but she's a British actress (Sonya Cassidy).  I just saw her playing the Countess in the most recent interation of The Woman in White.  I read the Wilkie Collins book years ago and completely forgot the plot.  She keeps giving people drugged tea and engaging in all kinds of unethical behaviors in The Woman in White.  She's a good deal more virtuous as a contemporary American woman.

[6pairsofshoes]

Now, Counterpart, on Starz.

Two nearly Berlins, people swapping lives with their counterparts for various reasons via a gateway.  It's entertaining.  Just finished Season 1.  It's kind of grim, somewhat futuristic in that the title sequence has people running around in nice Brutalist architecture like that designed by Louis Kahn.  It's kind of like the Cold War that never ends.  Has anyone else been watching it?

[8ullfrog]

Jessica Jones Season 2, Episode 13.

I messed up! I thought it was all "In Media Res" and thought it was a hell of a premiere, then I found out it was the last episode of the season! So now I don't want to watch the rest of it. Plus now I want a season 2 where that was the premiere!

Exclamation points!


Eh, it was internally consistent enough that I eventually understood the plot. Which I suppose is extremely high quality writing and directing.

[6pairsofshoes]

Just watched the first episode of Hard Sun.  Don't know if I want to watch more.  The future is grim.  The show is as subtle as a train wreck.

The music beating us over the head about how life will suck needs to lighten up.  Over-actors anonymous ought to get onto this cast.  I finally gave up on it.  It was too stabby.

[8ullfrog]

I'm sick as poo of dystopia. I loved the First Mass Effect game because it introduced me to a new galaxy of possibility!
Then the DLC "bring down the sky" reminded me that even in the future, everything sucks.

Haven't played the second yet, but I've heard the third is "Everything is fire, end of the world stuff, you must sacrifice yourself"

And like, I hated that trope when the Matrix pulled it. Screw self sacrifice. The end of Star Trek 2009 was stupid, but GOD was it satisfying when Kirk first offered rescue and aid, and when the bad guy screamed hatred and death, he said screw it, and blew the bad guy's ship to hell.

Sadly, the "lesson" 2k9 trek seemed to teach was "More hull breaches, more crew being sucked into space, this isn't depressing enough yet!"

[6pairsofshoes]

I got sick of people getting stabbed.  Richard Coyle, the ditzy guy from Coupling, here, gets to be a deranged psycho out just murdering people for the hell of it.  He's a very good actor, but I wonder what he was thinking when he accepted the role in this train wreck of a series.  This was episode 3 or 4, so I did give it a reasonable chance.
 
But, in the end, I just found it tiresome.  It was like some kind of odd violence porn.  It made me wonder what kind of demographic the show was aimed at.  After a while, I just turned it off out of disgust.  What's the point?

[8ullfrog]

I'm watching Gotham, since it's ending. Thanks to Damon ASSCLOWN Wayans.

I think I mentioned this before, that Damon flexed after already flexing and getting the mel Gibson character written off. Lethal weapon is a poo series, and Gotham is so much more.


So I went back, and loaded it up. They had a serial killer called "the goat" who is essentially batman. but he murders rich kids. And it's damn good writing. Jim Gordon gets locked up for killing Oswald Cobblepot, AKA Penguin.

So we've got fuggin Se7en, with batman, and it's fantastic. In the first season!

golly Damon Wayans, and his egg skull.

[6pairsofshoes]

The best tv series I've seen with a serial killer is Epitafios.  It was broadcast on HBO Latino but is out with subtitles.  So well done and Buenos Aires, the location, is such a beautiful city.  It was nice to see so many different neighborhoods in the shoots.

[6pairsofshoes]

Never saw that one.  Although adding Bruce Willis to this show couldn't have hurt it a bit.  Two supermodel cops, one with the obligatory fashionable beard, the other, taking a break from her cover shoots with hair shorn to show what a butch cop she is, seem ill equipped to deal with the rash of nutters their preemptive announcement of the upcoming cataclysm have unleashed.

I moved on to total chick flick worthy "The Split," Great Britain's answer to "The Good Wife" and its spinoff, "The Good Fight."  And now, some show set in Oxford, where a reluctant witch who haunts the "Bod" (good Christ do people really refer to the library in that way?) for research into history of alchemy (she's ostensibly a visiting fellow from Yale) has to join forces with dishy vampires (headed by Mr. Lady Mary of DownTown Abbey fame) for some reason or another.  Meanwhile the only older guy in the show is a mean witch who is clearly up to no good and out to cause trouble for our zoftig heroine.  It's called something like Research of Witches or Discovery of ...  Essentially, the good guys are good looking and the evils not so much.  Supposedly Trevor Eve will show up at some point, maybe needing to charge his cell phone or something.

[8ullfrog]

Stop making me want Bruce Willis fanfic. Or at least write it!

I tried writing a fanfic where some back of the frigate nerd figures out the ewoks are planning a suicide attack on a real housewives of couruscant fic and people wrote really unflattering poo about my psyche, so I deleted it. Like, I don't want to be psycho-analyzed when I'm writing nerd poo.

So if you're writing a Harry Stamper takes over the TV universe fic, it better be decent!


My favorite fic by the way, made Xander Harris from BTVS a Himbo to Faith Lehane, when her parents (from true lies) get vamped, and time travel has to be employed to save the world.

It was a hell of a fic, 96 chapters, and it died, like all fanfic, with a hiatus that never gets lifted. They crossed EVERYTHANG. West wing? Yup. X-files? Bet your ass. Friends? Why not, that was weird, what the golly...

Specifically, Eliza Dushku played Dana Tasker in True Lies, and Faith Lehane in Buffy The Vampire Slayer.



Also sadly, she got sexually harassed on Bull (CBS) and took a 9 million dollar be quiet payout, which is exploding now. Michael Weatherly is so bent...

[6pairsofshoes]

Damn Right! Harry would have gone to the sun, drilled a hole in it (after AJ nearly messed it up) and set off a dozen Neutron bombs that would ensure that the sun would burn for another gazillion years, and the supermodel cops would have been redundundant.

Nope - it was written by an American woman (Deborah Harkness - All Souls World trilogy), and that seems to be how (some) Americans think that Brits should refer to it. According to my American daughter-in-law they are cracking books (but she liked A Wrinkle in Time, too, so what does she know). Looks like a Charlaine Harris rip-off to me.

I'm currently pining for Rubovia.

I'm assuming that Bruce Willis would have a specially air conditioned suit for hanging out on the surface of the sun that would eliminate the normal vaporization in a nanosecond occasioned by the laws of physics.  Why not?

And the parallels with Twilight or other girl loves vampire and lives to tell the tale aspects of this show didn't escape me.  I saw an episode of True Blood and it looked interesting but my spouse is not a general fan of fantasy or SF so I tend to watch this stuff in the middle of the night.  The whole time I'm watching this, I'm thinking things like "that was not much of a lecture..."  "why would she publish that goofy generalized description of research" "and if he's dead, why would he want to have sex?" also, near the end of the series where he's "dying" "how can an undead guy be 'dying'"?  "Hasn't he already been there, done that?"

Other annoyances, like running hands over a rare manuscript, referring to the Bodleian as the "Bod" (recalling Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure more than serious research), and violations of common sense, have to be cast aside in order to enjoy this.  The sex scenes where people have it off in their underwear are pretty hilarious and clearly intended for preteens or some such demographic.   At times, I'm wondering how Matthew Goode keeps a straight face in this campy farce, given the corny lines he has to utter in that precious upscale accent.